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The Connecting-CPR Edition Saturday, October 22, 2016

App Helps Save Seattle Man After Heart Attack, by Gene Johnson, Associated Press

Seattle officials say the rescue shows the potential the free download has for connecting CPR-trained citizens with patients who urgently need their help. It's being used in 2,000 U.S. cities in 28 states.

"I put it on my phone yesterday," said DeMont's wife, Debi Quirk, a former registered nurse. "He would not be here as we see him today."

Seattle officials hope DeMont's story will help persuade thousands more people to sign up for notifications; so far, about 4,000 people in Seattle have downloaded PulsePoint since the city adopted it earlier this year with financial support from an employee charitable fund at Boeing. The goal is to have 15,000 using it.

How A Bunch Of Hacked DVR Machines Took Down Twitter And Reddit, by Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic

What began as a two-hour morning outage spanned well into the afternoon as Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, Github, and many other popular websites and services became effectively inaccessible for many American web users, especially those on the East Coast.

The websites were not targeted individually. Instead, an unknown attacker deployed a massive botnet to wage a distributed denial-of-service attack on Dyn (pronounced like dine), the domain name service (DNS) provider that they all share.

Stuff

Scheduling Availability In Microsoft Outlook On iOS, by Chad Garrett, The App Factor

When you compose a new email, Outlook gives you the ability to sneak over to your calendar and tap on the times you are available; typically between appointments. For example, I might have a meeting from 9-10, 2-3 and 3-4. All I need to do is tap in the empty time slots on the calendar to send the recipient when I am available. Tapping the hour blocks of 8-9 and 10-2 copy the times to the email that is very easily readable to my requester.

Go Play: Mini Metro, by Jason Snell, Six Colors

Mini metro reminds me a whole lot of SimCity, and in the best way. You can appreciate it on a very simple level, but if you really get into it you’ll discover all sorts of layers of strategy. Don’t connect too many circles together, for instance—they’re commuter stations, and the people who arrive there want to go to squares and triangles, not other circles. The list goes on.

Notes

A Walking Tour Of The Places Where I Hit Rock Bottom, by Michelle Tea, BuzzFeed

You might not be familiar with the term, “geographic” as used by recovering alcoholics. It refers to a time of geographical relocation whilst in the throes of active alcoholism. Like, your life is falling apart and shit is pretty fucked up and you come to the conclusion that if you just split town you could chill out and be normal again. This does not work, because locale was not your problem so much as your irrational compulsion to consume large quantities of alcohol regardless of the consequences. So, you can move to Detroit or Atlanta or Berlin or New Hampshire or Tucson but you bring your sloppy, slobbery, slurring self with you and re-create some version of your native problem in your fascinating new environment. I pulled my best geographic in 2001 when I moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco, my poor codependent, practically teenaged boyfriend in tow. Together we watched me bottom out in our cool new city. Now, 15 years later I’m back in the City of Angels. A lot has changed, no? Join me and my sidekick, Sandwich, as we visit some of my personal alcoholic bottom hot spots.